Ingrid Burrington @ingrid@everything.happens.horse

I'm currently doing novel historical search reviewing documents that have not been scanned or OCRed or in some cases translated into English, and something about the rush to rewrite the matter of the world with a good-enough chatbot using a good-enough dataset feels like an invitation from power to abandon questions the machine can't answer

Also learned:

- the quartz crystal market in Brazil was kind of a mess during WWII because you had both the federal government and private commodity traders from the US buying up supply so tracing sourcing starts to get fuzzy, but I have scans of monthly purchases by the USG and private vendors 1944-45 so I can at least track names and volume??

things learned on this national archives trip:

- the biggest German fused quartz concern prewar (Heraeus) definitely sourced from Brazil

- the colonial government of Belgian Congo was actively involved in developing tantalite sources for the United States (which is a big deal bc Belgian Congo mining prewar is mostly governed by private concession holders)

- most of the archives of the stuff happening in Congo are in Belgium and in French I'm fucked lol

Once again I am looking at risographs pretending I have a few grand to spare

additionally "guy" is famously gender neutral

Reading a book titled Davos Man (about billionaires who are the absolute worst) and really think the author should have titled it Davos Guy for increased comic effect

Also the cross section drawings!! So good!!

this drawing of a crystal in the national archives was such a treat to stumble upon today

I don't know if I'm ever going to get over learning that the guy who created the World Economic Forum expects that he'll someday receive a Nobel Peace Prize for doing this

I love my mom but definitely feels like 90% of the time we're just talking past each other and I've just learned to accept that as a relationship

Realizing that supply chain research is actually a skill set useful to the Federal Reserve I briefly looked at research jobs there but I think my tendency to call economics "cute when it pretends to be science" would be a hindrance

The guy at the Federal Reserve I'd been emailing with about semiconductor supply chains got in touch a few days ago and it was very funny to only me to say in an email to a Fed economist "given the recession I'm pretty sure I'm sticking around for a PhD"

this week in sentences: a continuous skeleton, regrettable habits, our constant enemy, Icarus' pivot, the requirements of art, a bag of words https://buttondown.email/perfectsentences/archive/perfect-sentences-04/

getting a haircut today with a new stylist who I hope will understand what I mean when I say I want my hair to produce confusion about my gender better than the stylist who kept giving me femme cuts

fuck, boygenius is pretty good huh